NeilB

If you've never given a talk at a Perl event before, and perhaps never given a talk at any tech event, I'd like to encourage you to give your first talk at the London Perl Workshop. I'm happy to be your LPW talk buddy, and help you prepare for it, and am confident that other people would be happy to help too.

The London Perl Workshop is on Saturday December 3rd in central London. There's still plenty of time to submit a talk, but the earlier you do that, the better.

Maybe you'd like to give a talk, but you don't know about what, or how to go about coming up with a talk. Here's a very simple plan:

• Decide what you want to talk about
• Collect a lot of notes
• Distil out your key message(s) and then structure your notes around a narrative to get your message(s) across
• Decide what length of talk
• Submit your proposal

The best way to come up with an idea for a talk is to write down as many talk ideas as you can come up with. Then spend a couple of minutes on each one, jotting down things you could say on that topic. You also need to consider for each one whether people are going to be interested in hearing it.

I think a talk buddy might be able to help you in the following ways:

• Coming up with a list of ideas for things you could talk about
• Evaluating the ideas on your list
• Giving feedback on your message and narrative
• Giving feedback on drafts of your slides, if your proposal is accepted

I'm in the middle of writing a series of blog posts to help you think about giving a talk. At some point you should watch this Damian Conway talk; it's one and a half hours, but well worth it.

Email me if you'd like to try the buddy idea: neil at bowers dot com. If multiple people take me up on this offer, I'll ask some other people to be buddies (let me know if you'd like to help out).